If you are planning to deploy Amazon RDS for SQL Server Developer Edition, one detail is easy to miss: this is not a license-included offering. You are expected to bring your own SQL Server Developer licensing entitlement when you create the instance. This little nugget of information came as a shock when I tried to build a Developer RDS instance.

This matters because many teams probably assume “Developer Edition” means “free everywhere.” The software edition itself is free from Microsoft for development and test use, but that does not mean AWS is packaging it as a standard license-included RDS option.

I firmly believe that no single individual will ever know everything about SQL Server. I’m constantly learning—often even in areas where I once felt confident in my expertise. Recently, I was discussing accelerated database recovery (ADR) with fellow MVP Ben Miller, specifically the cleaner thread pool introduced in SQL Server 2022.

If you’ve used Azure SQL Managed Instance General Purpose, you know the drill: to boost memory or I/O, you had to scale the whole instance, paying for extra CPU you might not need—and hoping the upgrade fixed the bottleneck. It worked but wasn’t elegant and could be slow or awkward. Scaling sometimes took hours when time was of the essence. The Next-Gen Azure SQL Managed Instance marks a major shift from the old model. It was way overdue.

Microsoft has released SQL Server 2025, bringing big improvements to its main database engine. This version focuses on AI features and better performance, aiming to meet the needs of today’s applications, from critical business systems to cloud-connected setups.

A short Christmas message wishing you and your family peace, joy, and good tidings as 2026 approaches.

When organizations migrate workloads to Azure, the focus is usually on architecture, performance, and security. Cost management should be part of that conversation—but in practice, it’s often treated as an afterthought. One of the most overlooked and underutilized tools in Azure is Budgets, despite the fact that it can prevent unpleasant billing surprises with minimal effort.

One of the more frustrating aspects about creating an Azure virtual machine is that if you do not place it into an availability zone at deployment time, you’ve traditionally had to rebuild it later. That usually meant starting from scratch or detaching the disks, creating a new VM, and reattaching them. Neither option is not horribly impactful, but both can be inconvenient and time-consuming. Until now.

Things Have Changed

While examining a virtual machine for a client, I discovered a new simpler method, move a virtual machine into a given availabilty zone with a few clicks of the mouse button. With the appropriate permissions, Azure will assign a system-managed identity and then effectively copy the virtual machine into whichever zone you choose. When the process completes, you’ll have two virtual machines:

Recently, the world was reminded of just how fragile the internet can be. Two well established cloud services, Cloudflare and Azure Front Door, both had simultaneous outages that caused major global havoc. Major platforms like LinkedIn, Zoom, Canva, DoorDash, and even crypto exchanges such as Coinbase and Kraken were knocked offline due to these inital outages. Even more recently Cloudflare had a secondary outage early Friday morning, December 5th, 2025. The cause of the inital outages? Configuration changes. Not malicious actors attempting to deliver cyberattacks, but instead it came from within each organization. It is a testament to how system updates or even human error can cascade into a massive global downtime event. Due to these outages, organizations potentially lost millions of dollars due to lost transcations, decreased productivity as well as an untold impact to customer trust.

Failing to plan is planning to fail.

When organizations first begin implementing Azure networking, the focus is often on the immediate requirements: connectivity, security, and performance for your databases and applications. While that is important, the reality is that your environment will change at some point in the future. Developers will deploy new resources, more users will connect, hybrid scenarios will evolve, and security needs will continue to grow and adapt. If you only plan for today, you risk painting yourself into a corner tomorrow.

In a recent video, I took a hands-on look at the Next Gen General Purpose service tier in Azure SQL Managed Instance—and it brings some exciting advancements to the table!

This update marks a significant evolution in the managed database space, offering improved performance, enhanced storage capabilities, and streamlined scaling for general-purpose workloads. Whether you’re migrating existing applications to Azure or architecting new cloud-native solutions, this tier is designed to meet modern demand with greater efficiency.